Thriving at Amazon: How Schumpeter Lives in Books Today

Amazon.com’s “Search Inside the Book†feature provides a new and exciting tool for bibliometric research. Over the last few years, a growing number of books listed on Amazon. com reference Schumpeter in some way. As of May 3, 2007, Amazon listed 8,086 books that in some way refer to Schumpeter. Of these, I currently have names and titles of 3,719 books in the Schumpeter Amazon database. Of these, I have done content-analysis for 1,176 books that make reference to Schumpeter. The main result is that a significant number of the references to Schumpeter are related to creative destruction. The percent of Schumpeter-references where the reference is related to creative destruction is significantly higher for books on business than books on economics. I believe this is a case where market demand reflects intellectual value, even if academic economics has not done much to incorporate Schumpeter’s central ideas